


knit up the heart and bid it break

by seventeencrows



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: M/M, a handle of tequila and another person, and he doesn't use the person for their skills in heartfelt conversation, jacobi's go-to coping method involves at least five pounds of C-4, spoilers for episode 57, trans Jacobi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 09:05:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12627612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventeencrows/pseuds/seventeencrows
Summary: daniel jacobi goes through the five stages of grief like he does everything else: haphazardly, irrationally, and only occasionally properly motivated.





	knit up the heart and bid it break

**Author's Note:**

> so on discord i was saying how i wondered if jacobi and klein’s relationship was a "knew him before the accident and became a bitter and vicious alcoholic and drove him away, only to find out years later that fucking oops, klein works for the same company jacobi just got hired to" thing or a "met while at goddard and jacobi's life purpose of being a human black hole ruined any good thing he had" thing
> 
> and then i realized there was a third, sadder option.
> 
> title from “give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” from the scottish play

i.

there isn’t a problem if you don’t admit to having one.

but it’s saying shit like that that makes klein look up from the newspaper he reads every morning like he’s sixty-five _(“just for the puzzles, daniel!”),_ eyebrow arched just over the newsprint when you stumble into the kitchen and sink into the chair next to him and peck him on the cheek like he hadn’t had to pick you up off of a sidewalk the night before. (you remember this day for a long time, find it lurking at the bottom of beer bottles or run into it in bar bathroom mirrors. klein had a job interview that afternoon with some fancy spaceflight company; he’d looked so alive.)

another day, with another night and another sidewalk and the hand he runs down your back as you heave _(“i’m here to help, daniel, please—”),_ he asks you how long you plan to keep living like this. you shrug, white-knuckled grip on this mausoleum of off-white porcelain and liquor bottle glass you’ve built to bury yourself in right next to the two guys you got killed. neither of you mentions that the other knows this isn’t really living.

and yet—there’s still a newspaper and the chair next to him and the eggs he makes because you can only ever burn them. klein still grabs you by the hair, the hips, drags you closer and kisses you sober, bites down your chest and across the scars so you can chase that sparking line of gunpowder just long enough for your head to break through the smoke.

for a while, it works.

 

ii.

you tell him to drop dead.

you yell some other nasty shit too, about how you never want to see him again and how you hope he chokes on his sanctimonious bullshit, but in the end you send him off by telling him you hope he drops stone-cold dead one of these days.

he slams the door hard enough the doorknob falls off as he goes and you smash every bottle you’ve got in the place before curling up on the kitchen floor in a cradle of glass and burnt bridges. it’s noble and tragic until you lay there long enough wise up to the fact that now you’ve got nothing in the house to _drink_ and then it’s just tragic, long enough that you only realize the alarm on your phone has been going off for twenty minutes when the upstairs neighbor pounds on your ceiling and yells for you to just check your goddamn microwave already.

so you set a countdown (like that wasn’t what got you in trouble in the first place), a timer that goes off somewhere at the base of your skull in the middle of the bar, when the man in the suit buys you a glass of scotch worth more than you are. halfway through telling him it’s the two year anniversary of the worst day of your life, you remember that it’s also supposed to be the four year anniversary of the best, and there must be something in the look on your face that makes him flash you that papercut smile. it’s as sharp as the corners of the business card he sets under your tumbler when he buys you another drink.

you mumble it against his skin later, with his fingers pressed inside you and his mouth on your neck, on the curve of your jaw, the corner of your lips as you dig your nails into his back. it’s nothing he doesn’t already know about you, this white-flag confession _(“all previous relationships—professional or personal—are in your file, mr. jacobi.”),_ but you need to see him hear you say it, all three evils in a row as he strokes a hand down your tinderbox spine and pulls you down with him.

 

iii.

a man walks into a bar and says ouch.

a small private army steps onto the hephaestus and no one says a damn thing at all.

something sparks and starts to catch in riemann’s expression when you turn to kepler _(“any idea who these yahoos are?”),_ and spreads like a wildfire when cutter steps into your achingly civil little standoff. inexplicably, none of you get shot or vented into space or gruesomely devoured when miranda pryce and her mad-eye moody glare stomp in and take right the fuck over instead of her and cutter just unhinging their jaws and going for your throats. it’s an easy enough thing to do when they stand safely behind the merry band of mercenaries they’ve brought with them, and cutter watches you watch them like he’s waiting for something _really_ funny.

minkowski hears the names. they’re what make her stop and really look, but you can’t say for sure what it was for you. you’re not nostalgic or stupid enough to think you could pick him out of a crowd after so long, but there’s something that catches your eye, lights up in the back of your head like thermite. something behind the glare of a riot-gear face shield, the line of a jaw or the arch of his eyebrows or the curve of a cheek you used to press kisses to like they were worth anything more than the liquor they were stamped in. that one time you fought at three in the morning while you clutched a half-empty bottle of vodka in your fist and told him you’d see him in hell, this is _never_ what you expected. you never wanted to see him again, and the thing is—

the longer you watch this glassy-eyed, stiff-backed monster as he ushers you away and locks you up with lovelace, as he grabs you by the hair and drags you closer, to a chair and a needle and your own fog-eyed reflection, you realizes you never will.

 

iv. 

“every bad feeling i had just went away,” you hear yourself say. “i just know that things are going to be okay.”

that’s the thing about poisons—alcohol, adrenaline, bioelectrically-administered synthetic neurotransmitters—they all kill you in the end. most of them the same way, too: slowly, without prisoners, but you know it’s not the number of shots or the almost actually _getting shot_ that catches up to you. it’s waking up the next morning in the spaces in between with all the bad feelings you let steep overnight. it’s remembering they’re still there.

this new routine is, strangely enough, familiar. klein finding you in the morning curled in your bed between your poor life choices and every twisted, broken cobblestone that led you here. him not saying much because there’s nothing left to say, nothing he _can_ say (more permanent, cutter had said, and there’s a claw of fear that wraps around your throat from the inside for a moment before it’s ushered along to where all the bad feelings have gone these past two weeks—away). you’re so deep-down, hid-away lost now, so smoothed-over hollow that you can overlook the hairline fractures in the corners of his eyes, in his tight-lipped smile. you’d like to think it’s the implant doing that, if you were in the habit of thinking at all nowadays, but flooding over cracks in the hopes that they’ll glaze is something you got good at a long time ago.

klein’s even further gone than you are now and he didn’t even need a bottle to get there—but it’s been a long time since you entertained the notion of bringing him home.

how old hat. nearly a decade later, you both still know how to solve this puzzle.

 

v.

“do you know on what frequency pryce is sending signals to the hermes crew?”

(radio frequencies are easy to jam and incidentally, the sol is easily twice the size of the urania and has the storage hardware to match—you had a sister and you had a friend, and you’ll do right by the both of them if it’s the last thing you do. because it very well might be.)

“if this w̷o̴r̷k̷s, you’re not going to leave them like _anything.”_ hera says. she glitches around the words; you can’t tell if it’s from the strain or misplaced grief. as she says it, there’s an entire conversation you two aren't having. _you know that they’ll—you know that means they—_

“we were friends,” you decide to tell her eventually and you shrug, white-knuckled grip on this mausoleum you’re building for someone else. _they what?_

_drop dead?_

**Author's Note:**

> find me @rahayn on tumblr


End file.
